PHOTO BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
THE NEXT COUP THE THREAT TO AMERICA’S
electoral system did not end when the U.S. Capitol was cleared. From the January 6, 2022, program “The Next January 6.” This program is part of the Club’s Future of Democracy Series. BARTON GELLMAN, Staff Writer, The Atlantic ROY EISENHARDT, Lecturer, University of California Berkeley School of Law—Moderator ROY EISENHARDT: Let’s start with the intuition you had back in October 2020 to foresee that there was not going to be—for the first time in our history, unless you count 1877—a peaceful transition of power from
the former executive to the recently elected executive. Were did that intuition come from? BARTON GELLMAN: It started with a pretty simple proposition. It seems obvious to me and to lots of people that Donald Trump under no circumstances was going to concede the election if he lost. He simply doesn’t have it in him. It’s not in his personality. It’s not in his political strategy. He was going to insist that he had won no matter what and forever. Once you start with that proposition and ask yourself, What tools does he have available to him to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, to prevent the election from being decided against him? It turns out that it’s very complicated, and there are a lot of commonwealthclub.org | THE COMMO N WE AL TH
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